| Summary, etc |
Part history, part examination of our current state of drug treatment, and part exploration of what we might do to improve it, Addiction, Inc. tells the story of medication-assisted treatment for opiate addiction, or MAT. The author, Emily Dufton, details how MAT was conceived in the 1970s as a liberal initiative to provide a medicalized "off-ramp" from the burgeoning war on drugs and then argues that, over the past fifty years, it has degraded from a liberal dream of socialized healthcare that treated addiction as a disease into a largely private, predatory system that emphasizes profit over rehabilitation. This is, as she points out, a particularly dangerous situation when over a million Americans have overdosed since 2000 alone and the opioid epidemic rolls on. Addiction, Inc. is an unprecedented history, decade by decade, of the opioid-treatment industry and its shifting fortunes in Washington and beyond. It is a character-driven look at the opioid crisis from another, stomach-churning angle, and for Dufton, this story is personal: half a dozen of her classmates in her graduating high school class have not made it to 40, dying after decades of drug use. America's opioid epidemic is devastating, and it has spurred new interest in understanding addiction and treatment options. During the 1970s, when the US was undergoing a similar heroin epidemic, the federal government responded by launching a nationwide program of federally subsidized addiction treatment clinics, and during this time both the overdose rate and the crime rate plunged. But since then, the system has been transformed into an immensely profitable private industry. According to Dufton, the addiction treatment industry in effect sold out, offering poor care at high costs to a decreasing number of people. |